|
a service provided by www.english.upenn.edu |
FAQ changelog |
all recent posts
A conference hosted by the Graduiertenkolleg Authority and Trust (GKAT) at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA), Heidelberg University
Date: May 20–22, 2026
Location: Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Heidelberg
Anglistik (e-ISSN: 2625-2147) is a peer-reviewed German-based triannual open-access journal for Anglophone Studies
Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies welcomes submissions for its October 2026 issue, which seeks to reconsider how literature translates bodily experience into writing and visibility, and how the body, in turn, discloses and shapes literary meaning.
Back in the mid-twentieth century, the political novel used to be a respectable field of study, commanding the attention of influential critics like Irwing Howe. These days, not so much. In fact, most scholarly books with the phrase ‘political novel’ in the title published over the past three decades or so were not written by professional critics, but rather by historians and political scientists (including Christopher Harvie, John Uhr, and Stuart A. Scheingold).
Note on Publishing Opportunity:
We have been encouraged by the general editor of the Bloomsbury Ecocritical Theory and Practice series, Douglas Vakoch, to submit a proposal for an edited collection based upon this CFP. If you're interested in submitting your conference presentation as a proposed book chapter, please let us know in your submission. Bloomsbury requests chapters of at least 6000 words with at least one author with a PhD. More information on the series may be found here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/ecocritical-theory-and-practice/
Panel CFP
See ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) listing for submission portal: https://www.acla.org/seminar/10bd9b61-e065-472a-8698-c8949a85f069
Paper proposals cannot be accepted via email.
Death Studies is a field of study that not only draws from a host of disciplines like anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and psychology but also cuts across fields such as bereavement studies, trauma studies, and health humanities.
Be(Long)ing in Planetary Space
We invite papers on the cerebral Dickens, but also on “the mind of the heart” (David Copperfield): on how Charles Dickens thought, but also how and what we think about him. Suitable topics might include:
Dickens and philosophy, psychology, statistics, or the natural sciences
Dickens and his intellectual friends and contemporaries, such as Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot
How Dickens and his readers develop ideas through and by means of language
Plotting, planning, and making connections
The Dickens Society invites submissions for its sponsored hybrid panel at the 57th NeMLA convention, which takes as its theme the concept of “(Re)generation.” This event, which utilizes the conference app Whova and Zoom to promote accessibility and hybridity, will be held in Pittsburgh, PA at the Wyndham Grand Downtown, on the Point from March 5-8, 2026.
SUBJECT: Lorefest Call for Papers
Lorefest – Oct 29-Nov 01, 2025. Lorefest Conference 9am-5pm, Nov 01, 2025, Texas A&M University,
College Station, TX.
Lorefest is an annual festival combining scholarly research and creative practice
inspired by local and “glocal” (i.e. globally-inspired, locally-rooted) folklore. It brings together
the Texas A&M student body, their family and friends, and local Bryan/College Station
communities culminating in a four-day event in late October/early November. Its organizers
Romancing the Gothic Talk Series
This talk series offers online talks each week and has a global audience and speaker pool. Talks are 40-45 minutes and are run (in real time) twice to catch different time zones. An honorarium is offered. Our categories, laid out below, allow for flexibility. Please contact me (details at the end) if you have any questions. We strongly encourage speakers to attend other sessions as well as there own and join in with the community!
Weeks after the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro last year, her daughter Andrea Skinner disclosed the sexual abuse she'd suffered as a child—abuse about which Munro had known and stayed silent. The disclosure is but one of many revelations in recent years to upend the legacy of a cultural icon. Neil Gaiman, Louis CK, Jean Vanier, and Avital Ronell are only a few public figures to be reassessed in the wake of accounts of sexual abuse. Similarly, disputed claims to Indigenous ancestry touted by artists including novelist Joseph Boyden and singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie have generated outrage and heartbreak among Indigenous groups and innumerable admirers, compounding generational traumas.
We invite chapter proposals for an edited scholarly collection that critically examines the religious dimensions of Indian diasporic women’s literature, with a specific focus on conversion, resistance, and cultural memory. This volume will explore how women writers from the Caribbean, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, and other sites of indenture engage with Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, addressing the gendered and ideological tensions of community rupture, religious fidelity, and transgenerational transmission in diasporic settings.
Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities formally invites Black Digital/Public Humanities project directors to submit their projects to our interactive map and searchable database of 650+ international Black Digital/Public Humanities projects.
Mapping BDPH is an interactive and searchable map of digital and public humanities projects related to Black history & culture. The goals of this project are threefold:
to help people find digital and public projects about Black history and culture by topic, type, location, contributors, and more.
This roundtable will explore the theme of mad echoes within contemporary (re)generations of literature and her/their/history. The term (re)generation calls forth processes of renewing or restoring something that has been lost or damaged. Damage and loss have been ways of speaking about the lasting and ongoing violences against marginalized bodies that have been labeled as Mad, pathologized, or institutionalized, but the limits of these concepts have been contested, perhaps most notably in Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” which interrogates the (un)helpfulness of damage-focused research to the pursuit of justice and wellbeing for members of marginalized communities.
In her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, Sara Ahmed asks how we are oriented and how we come to find our way. Ahmed thus thinks across queer feminist theories of sexuality and traditional phenomenology, evaluating the latter’s efforts to bring what is commonplace or taken-for-granted into focus, and doing so through matrices of gender, race, and sexuality.
FINAL CALL for papers: 1 spot remaining
This panel interrogates the title “The Uncanny and Sublime: The Liminality of Knowledge” by asking: what constitutes knowledge when it emerges from thresholds—moments of affect, disorientation, or aesthetic rupture? How does the liminal “unknowing” of the uncanny and sublime inform new modes of intellectual inquiry? Does this liminality reorient traditional ways of thought?
Odour and Order: Smell, Culture and Representation
Keynote: Jonathan Reinarz (University of Birmingham)
In the age of Artificial Intelligence, more accurately, the “age of AI Empire” (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian 2023), machines are no longer defined solely by their ability to process information. They are increasingly imagined as also capable of emotion, bodily awareness and interaction with the natural environment. This seminar examines the representation of embodied AI in literature and digital media focusing on the interrelationships between humans and the more-than-human alongside the growing emphasis on the body as a site of knowledge.
Call for Papers
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025
Call for Papers
Science, Technology, and Culture
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2025
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025
The Mystery & Detective Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association invites proposals for the 56th annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia, April 8-11, 2026, to be held at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis.
We seek proposals from researchers, academics, graduate students, and independent scholars for scholarly discussions on all aspects and periods of mystery and detective fiction. Interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged.
We ask that proposals extend existing scholarship in new directions and avoid plot summary or review. Proposals should have a clear and focused argument that can be developed adequately in a 15-minute presentation.
Some possible topics for the 2026 conference:
I invite you to please consider submitting a abstract for the following panel to be hosted ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies) at the 2026 Conference. This conference will be help April 9-11 in Philadelphia.
CAIS Fall Teaching Symposium
New Directions in Italian Language and Culture Teaching: North American Perspectives
October 25, 2025
University of Guelph and Online
The Canadian Association for Italian Studies invites proposals for a one-day conference, with in-person panels to be held at the University of Guelph and online panels via Zoom, that offers an opportunity to reflect on the current state of the evolving field of Italian language pedagogy in North America.
Seminar title: The World of World Literatures: Practices, Pedagogies, and Possibilities
Organizers: Dr. Mir Islam, Nalanda University, India. Arunav Das, University of South Carolina, USA
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026, Montreal, Canada
Abstract Submission Deadline: October 2, 2025. Must be submitted through the ACLA portal.
ACLA annual convention: February 26 - March 1, 2026. Montreal, Canada (In-person)
More info: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting
Department of Liberal Arts
Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai
presents
Gendered Modalities of Remembering in South Asian literatures
A National Conference
15–16 January 2026
Call for Papers
Concept Note:
We invite chapters for a multi-disciplinary edited collection exploring heavy metal and rock bands that use concealed identities, stage personas and masks as a substantial part of their performance and aesthetic. Hidden identities are not a new phenomenon in either popular music generally or heavy metal/hard rock music more narrowly, as performers obscuring their identity through face paint, masks, and wigs goes back over half a century and encompasses bands including Kiss, Slipknot, and Gwar. New masked bands, including Sleep Token and Ghost, have recently risen to widespread popularity.
“And away above all with the body, that idée fixe of the senses!” Nietzsche has philosophy proclaim. For it is “infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even,” and “impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed.” The body has long been one of philosophy’s more persistent preoccupations as it’s impossible to define without distortion yet impossible to fully discard. From Plato’s call to transcend the body in search of truth to Descartes’ relegation of the body to mere extension, philosophy has long sought to escape or sanitize embodiment. Even phenomenology, which counters the Cartesian account, privileges the lived body of perception over the objective, material body and its historical conditions.
Veiling obscures, but also reveals. It holds symbolic and aesthetic power that spans centuries, from the medieval and Victorian periods to contemporary expressions in visual, fashion, and social media culture. Further, it frames visibility itself and shapes how identity is hidden, controlled, surveilled, or disclosed. To veil is not only to conceal, but to shape what others are allowed to see and what they are left to imagine. Veiling shrouds, but also frames; withholds, but also invites interpretation. These tensions give veiling its interpretive depth, sustaining its power to provoke, unsettle, and reframe.
Call for Book Chapters
Portrayals of the Fourth of July in American Culture and Literature:
Reimagining American Identity at USA 250
Extension: September 15, 2025
Update: due date extended to Friday, Sept. 26, 2025
Following the highly successful panels at ALA 2025, the Edith Wharton Review is planning a special issue on Edith Wharton and Popular Culture.
Dissension exists on a spectrum. It can be expressed on an individual scale—by rejecting challenges to ethical or moral beliefs—or within collectives that object to systems that harm or subjugate. Literature can be used as an act of protest and resistance, to create counter narratives that combat oppressive agendas; it can mirror the outcry of societies that wish to test the limits of oppression but lack the voice to do so. Now more than ever, it is imperative that we listen to those voices that systems continually work to silence. Authoritarianism, protest, incarceration, and revolution are interwoven themes that dominate allegorical genres such as dystopian fiction.
This seminar reflects on the relationship between law and literature, particularly on how literary forms and narratives interact with political and social legal orders. Julie Peters credits the “antidisciplinarity” of both law and literature as central to the movement that emerged in the 1980s. Bringing this conversation to the 21st century, this seminar seeks to bring fresh perspectives on this interdisciplinary approach by expanding its theoretical scope. Sub-fields like trauma studies have long reflected on the challenges and possibilities of representing and aestheticizing atrocity and suffering.
CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
invites submissions for hybrid panels at the Leeds International Medieval Conference 2026 (July 6-9) on the theme of
Premodern Timeliness and Timelessness
Time is a construct with notoriously blurry definitions and boundaries. The artificiality of time can evoke anything from comforting nostalgia to worrying anachronism. Ceræ invites papers that deal with the unfocused and unreal aspects of premodern temporality, including but not limited to:
This is a call for papers for a hybrid session at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA which will take place March 5-8, 2026. Please see this link for the CFP and to submit through the NeMLA site: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21963 .
Open to any languages, this roundtable explores how instructors are integrating AI tools in the context of translation—whether through small tasks, full assignments, or larger projects—and how these technologies can be leveraged to enhance students’ linguistic and cultural competencies. More specifically, how can AI support the development of students’ intercultural awareness, stylistic sensitivity, and translation skills? In what ways might it help students better understand grammar, vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and register in both the source and target languages? What kinds of assignments can we design to foster a critical and effective use of AI without compromising learning outcomes or creative engagement?
9/1/25 - 9/22/25: Litmag Subs are OPEN!The theme is: The Urge
… as in the many faces of “the feminine urge” — to cave-dwell or home-make, towards tenderness or violence, giddiness or belligerence, nurturing or devouring, and so on.
We’d like to explore a full spectrum of “the female experience,” and especially showcase her inner world. What makes her tick? What’s behind the mask and under her skin? Which desires and urges are rarely spoken but always just below the surface?
The groundbreaking anthology Early American Writings (2001)edited by Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans, incorporated writing that represented a range of authors and texts that showcased the broad diversity of literature of the early Americas. The volume not only reflected but inspired new areas of research and teaching that have continued today. In keeping with the theme of the 2026 NeMLA conference, (Re)generation, the goal of this session will be to continue this expansive vision of the literature of the early Americas and showcase scholarship that represents innovative ways of thinking about these literatures.
Popular Culture Association 2026 (PCA 26): Atlanta, GA
April 2026
"Visual Culture’s Pasts, Presents, and Futures"
The VISUAL CULTURE area of the Popular Culture Association welcomes proposals in anticipation of its 2026 conference, which will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 8-11.
All are cordially invited to present their research regarding current issues of tourism, archaeology, heritage and history in English or Arabic.
The full articles of the conference will be published as the book of conference (provided with International Standard Book Number (ISBN), and according to the Governmental Approval (The Ministry)), and also will be indexed in CIVILICA (however, the book of abstracts will be published too).
You may select either Virtual Presentation or In-Person Presentation.
Conference Themes
A) Tourism (Any issue related to tourism)
Rob Nixon describes, ‘slow violence’, as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space”, one “that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). This seminal work raised the critical question of the strategic difficulties of representing the impact of such violence, especially as it crossed national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and even gendered borders.
This seminar investigates how repression, repetition, and unresolved rhythms shape emotional experience across Anglophone literature, heritage film, and contemporary media. It emphasizes stalled movements of feeling, looping tensions, and residues that resist closure. Such affective patterns disrupt inherited memories and unsettle formations of Englishness and other post-imperial identities. At the center of this seminar lies a guiding question: how do patterns of emotion simultaneously sustain and fracture collective identity?
Call for Abstracts for an Edited Volume
Tastes of Text: Food and Indian Literature
Editors
Dr.Auritra Munshi, Assistant Professor, Raiganj University
Dr. Surabhi Jha, ICSSR Postdoctoral Researcher, Aliah University
Concept Note
In a world that constantly urges us to scale up—to dream bigger, to grow up, to grasp the “big picture”—what does it mean to think small? This seminar turns to the miniature, not merely as an object of study but as a method of inquiry. To think with the miniature is to reconsider scale itself—not as a neutral or fixed formal property of things, but as a way of seeing and knowing, shaped by desire, enabled by technology, and embedded within power relations.
After an enriching conference in 2025, Heavy Childhoods 2026 will run under the title “Curating Future Nostalgia inHeavy Times”
Forms in Dialogue
Universität Konstanz, 11-13 Juni 2026
Note: All abstracts must be submitted through the Annual Meeting and Membership portal at https://www.xcdsystem.com/asecs/member/
You do not need to be a member to submit an abstract through the portal; however, you must be a member of ASECS to present at the conference. The panel chair cannot submit the abstract on your behalf.
Trans-scriptions: Cultural Codings and the Poetics of the Body
International Conference organized by University of Szczecin & University of Wrocław
11-13 February 2026
Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland Hybrid On-site Conference
Date: November 8-9, 2025
Location: University of Oxford, UK
Online option available
Conference page: https://labrc.co.uk/2024/11/20/alchemy-2025/
Cost: 180 GBP (In person)
100 GBP (Online)
Prices exclude eventbrite fees
“Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicines.” – Paracelsus
Conference online: 18-19 September 2025 (via Zoom)
Scientific Committee:
Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland
Professor Polina Golovátina-Mora – NTNU, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Professor Ryan Habermeyer - Salisbury University, USA
CFP: